One of our earlier projects was Italian Pancetta, I took such care of it keeping the temperature at 50 F and humidity at 68%, it was a nightmare due to the ambient (outside temperature) but that's another topic. We wanted weight loss to be about 25 - 30 % and it was looking good until a little mold appeared which turned into this




AND THIS





We looked everywhere to find out what to do, was this good mold or bad... Some words of wisdom was if it is white powder then this is very good, if it is fuzzy then toss it. This started out as white powder but grew green.

I remembered a old butcher that I worked with 25 years ago, he had a personal stash of meat which he would hang forever. If we went near it he would toss a knife our way, actually hit one of us once. I asked him about the "Green Mold" he would just cut it off, I thought he was nuts.... he was a very traditional French nut, used to cut meat with a smoke hanging out of his mouth. Well to make a long story short, he said to just cut it off and let your nose tell you if it is bad, not very scientific but with the choice of turfing this project I thought of giving it a try. (WARNING YOU BE THE BEST JUDGE OF YOUR OWN PROJECTS, a week being sick is your call) 

this is what I got


As you can see it got progressively better

My next slice was heaven, there was about 30 % loss, and after I did some more sculpting it was down to 15%. 

DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME...

Knowing I had a few days of sick time at work.... I fried it up and it was fantastic... I was not puking that day or the next, Barb tried it out the next night and she has not died either, come to think of it I should have tried it on her first....  

Well lesson learned... If you see just a smidgen of mold get it off with  salt water, or lemon, or vinegar

What ever it takes